A year ago Saturday, Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews, a soft-spoken former Mountie with a moustache, travelled from Ottawa to Guelph, rented a suite in the Holiday Inn, and sat down to interview voters who had received an automated phone call on election day telling them to go to the wrong polling station.

“It was very formal,” said Susan Campbell, who was one of the witnesses who trooped down to the Holiday Inn that day, where Mathews conducted his interviews with a voice recorder on the table.

“He explained what he was doing, all that stuff. He asked me tons of questions.”

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The interview with Campbell and other Guelph voters Mathews spoke with in the following days formed the starting point for the politically charged robocalls investigation that now appears to be drawing to an end.

Soon, it is expected, Mathews will file a report to his boss, Commissioner of Canada Elections William Corbett. It will be up to Corbett to decide whether Mathews’ findings warrant referring the case to the director of public prosecutions, who will decide if Elections Canada should lay charges under the Elections Act.

The day charges are laid, the public will finally know the identity of the person alleged to be Pierre Poutine, the culprit who sent hundreds of voters on a fool’s errand to the polling station at the Quebec Street Mall.

But the greater consequences, politically, depends on whether the fraudulent robocalls were the work of a single mischief maker on the local campaign, or a more co-ordinated effort with a trail of evidence leading deeper into the Conservative Party’s national campaign.

Most voters Mathews interviewed in Guelph told him they had earlier received voter-identification calls from the Conservative campaign, which meant they were tagged in the party’s database as opposition supporters.

Mathews noted that Campbell’s husband, John, was the Green Party candidate in the riding, “so their voting intention could be easily determined.”

Mathews recorded that observation in an Information to Obtain a Production Order — a legal document he filed in Ottawa on June 8, 2011, seeking records from Bell Canada for the Joliette, Que., phone number — 450-760-7746 — used to make the deceptive calls.

It was the first of many applications for court orders that Mathews filed as he followed the trail to servers at Internet providers and phone companies all around North America. In the most recently released court order, Mathews finally followed the trail back to Guelph — when he received subscriber information for the Rogers Internet account that appears to have been used to set up the election-day call.

After the account number was published last week, several Guelph Conservatives at the heart of the Elections Canada investigation all checked their account numbers and claimed they were in the clear.

Campaign manager Ken Morgan and campaign workers Michael Sona and Andrew Prescott have all apparently told others that the account doesn’t belong to any of them.

And the account number is not the same as the numbers that appear on receipts filed with Elections Canada by the campaign of Conservative candidate Marty Burke.

In his application for the court order to Rogers, Mathews relies heavily on information provided by Matt Meier, owner of RackNine, the Edmonton voice-broadcasting company that was used to send the deceptive robocalls.

In November, when Mathews approached him with a production order demanding records, Meier was not able to produce the IP address used by the person who sent the calls. After the Ottawa Citizen and Postmedia News broke the robocall story in February, Meier was under intense and uncomfortable media coverage, including attacks that the NDP subsequently apologized for making.

In March, Meier went public to claim that he had found a key piece of evidence. Frustrated by the damaging coverage, he stayed up one night combing through session logs and found an electronic link that seems to show that the person who sent the calls also was signing into RackNine’s servers from the same Internet Protocol (IP) address used by someone who accessed Prescott’s account.

Prescott, who cancelled an interview with Mathews in March on his lawyer’s advice, has repeatedly publicly stated that he had nothing to do with the calls. Others involved with the Guelph campaign say they don’t think he was involved, and say he is unfairly bearing the brunt for a scheme carried out by others.

One source who has spoken to Mathews says the investigator said there is a limit to how far a case can be built on just an IP address.

And sources say that people with knowledge of the inner workings of the Burke campaign have not been forthcoming with investigators.

“The guys are waiting it out,” said one person who spoke on condition of anonymity. “From my understanding, their lawyers are just saying there’s nothing they can do to stick it to them.”

The small group of people who are believed to have knowledge of the vote-suppression scheme appear to be in communication with one another but they are said not to be spilling the beans, hoping that if they all hold their tongues, Elections Canada won’t have enough facts to make a case.

“I think they’re looking for evidence they’re not going to find,” said a source. “There’s solidarity in silence and as long as nobody talks they can’t pin it on anybody.”

Mathews does not give interviews and Elections Canada won’t comment on the ongoing investigations, but sources with knowledge of the investigation believe it is nearing completion.

One source says that Mathews began last week writing the report that Corbett will send to the director of public prosecutions Brian Saunders, who will decide if there are grounds for charges to be laid under the Elections Act.

Mathews is said to be awaiting some information, but another source with knowledge of the process says he can file his report even if the investigation continues.

“It doesn’t mean the investigation is necessarily over.”

The last major case that Elections Canada referred to Saunders, the in-and-out allegations against the Conservatives over their financing of the 2006 election, eventually led to charges against the party and four officials, including senators Doug Finley and Irving Gerstein. They were accused of breaching the party’s spending limit with a complex scheme to pay for $1.3 million in advertising with wire transfers that shuttled money between the national and local campaigns.

Charges against the four were later dropped when the party agreed to plead guilty to Elections Act charges and pay $52,000 in fines. The prosecutor said the outcome was preferable to a trial because, had the four officials been convicted, the fines would not have been any stiffer.

While the Tories aggressively defended the in-and-out allegations and attacked Elections Canada for alleged bias, the party has taken a much different approach to the Guelph robocalls probe.

The most recent court filings make it plain that Mathews has been working with Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton as he pursues the case.

Hamilton has been arranging and sitting in on interviews with party workers who meet with Mathews, and providing him with electronic records.

Conservative sources say the party has opened its doors to investigators, encouraging staffers to share whatever they know about what happened in Guelph.

Senior officials insist that whatever happened was the work of a small group in Guelph, and had nothing to do with campaign headquarters in Ottawa, where chairman Guy Giorno was running a tight ship.

Sources have said, though, that Mathews has asked witnesses pointed questions about missing data in electronic records he received from the party, which suggests investigators may not have ruled out the idea that the central party had something to do with the calls.

And investigators at the agency are looking into reports that similar calls were made in ridings across Canada.

After the story broke in February, Elections Canada was inundated by complaints. Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand testified in front of a parliamentary committee in March that the agency has received 800 specific complaints from 200 ridings across Canada.

Investigators have interviewed voters who received calls sending them to the wrong polling stations after receiving voter-identification calls in which they stated they did not plan to vote for the Conservatives, the same pattern Mathews observed in Guelph a year ago.

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